Paris Trance (16 page)

‘C’est qui?’

‘Le type qui m’a attaqué
.
’ We looked down the narrow passage. He had seen us, but continued towards us.

‘What shall we do?’ said Luke. The guy was drawing closer. When he was within a few paces of us we stopped walking and he stopped too.

‘Tu me cherches ou quoi?’ It took us by surprise, his speaking first, and it alerted us to the fact that, yes, perhaps we were looking for him, for trouble.

‘Tu me reconnais?’ Ahmed said

‘On aurait déjà été présenté?’ he sneered. He was drunk, heavily built, with small scars on his forehead and chin. Tough people always look like that, like they’ve spent their lives getting beaten up.

‘Disons que tu t’es fait connaître,’ Ahmed said, pointing to his nose which was still swollen. There was a small purple mark beneath his left eye.

The guy spat. ‘Pas moi.’ He was smiling, indifferent, not frightened.

‘Si. Toi.’ We were standing close to him, close enough to smell the booze on his breath over and above the beer that was on ours. Tacitly incriminating, the letters FN were scrawled on the wall behind him. He looked round and realized that he was cornered. It wasn’t that we had him cornered – we wouldn’t have known how to do such a thing – but it happened that he was cornered. He looked at us, tried to gauge our intentions, noticed that we had none. We were all hoping that the matter would be taken out of our hands, decided for us. If we thought we sensed his nervousness, fear even, that was just a magnified reflection of our own. My heart was beating harder. He smiled again, becoming more certain that, although there were five of us, we were incapable of a descent into violence. We didn’t know how to go about it. It was all down to him. We were four or five feet away and I was starting to tremble, a kind of vertigo, an awareness of being close to the edge of something. Even so, maybe nothing would have happened – I think we all realized that none of us, in spite of the loathing we felt for him, was capable of making the first move, not even Ahmed – if he had not forced it to happen. He saw us faltering and decided this was the moment to make a break for it. If he had waited for us to get closer, until we were a foot or so from him, perhaps nothing would have happened. Probably we would have ended up talking to him. But he couldn’t wait that long, his experience of fighting told him that once a group closes in on you like that you’re finished. And so he charged at us, fists flailing, trying to burst through the loose cordon we had formed.

It almost worked. Fear is the instinctive response to aggression and abruptly all our encroaching menace had been flung back at us. We flinched. Even as we tried to block his escape so, simultaneously, we were trying also to move aside. He ran at us and hit Luke in the side of the face, elbowed Matthias. He kept his knees high and dangerous like a rugby player making a lunge for the line. Daniel was directly in front of him and the guy swiped a fist at him. Daniel swayed back to avoid the blow, leaving a path clear for him. Suddenly there was no one to stop him getting away and the sense of how pathetically easy it had been made him pause, turn slightly and aim a punch at Ahmed, to show us how feeble our shuffling threat was in the face of someone who understood the reality of pain and violence. He could not only get away, he could dish out some hurt in the process. Luke grabbed his fist as he was preparing to smash it into Ahmed’s face and at that same moment Daniel dived into his back, almost knocking him over. Then we were all scrambling over each other. He was lashing out wildly, without thought, trying to remain on his feet, oblivious to the blows that caught his face and shoulders. He had his hand around Luke’s throat. Matthias hit him hard on the ear and he swung around, scattering us all. His legs and arms were flying everywhere. He was not aiming at anyone now, but was trying to create a centrifugal force of violence so great that no one could approach him. Again he almost succeeded. We had all fallen back when Daniel kicked him in the small of the back. He pitched forward, stumbled, was about to regain his balance. Then Ahmed brought his fist down on the back of his neck. He was still on his feet but suddenly we were swarming all over him, sometimes catching each other with an elbow in our eagerness to get at him. Fists and feet were flying everywhere, we were oblivious to the pain of punches. For a few seconds everything was in the balance and then, for the first time, he was on the defensive, using his arms increasingly to protect himself, allowing us to move closer to him. Able to get to him with next to no risk we all piled in. I was hit twice by glancing blows from Matthias or Luke. Less from any particular blow than the chaos of our attack, he began to go over, arms curled around his head as we flung our feet at him.

It lasted only ten or twenty seconds but I remember those seconds as being some of the most charged of my life. I think we all felt the same way. It was like something had been unleashed. A latent part of our being, our species, that, until then, none of us had ever directly experienced, suddenly made itself felt. It was as if we had been granted a violent insight into a fundamental flaw in the process of evolution. Everything was a blur and everything was perfectly clear. I remember my foot thudding into his ribs at exactly the moment that Matthias called out: ‘Arrêtez les mecs, arrêtez!’

We stood for a few seconds, the alley dense with the fog of our breath, gazing down at the huddled figure on the floor. Luke kicked him again in the back, very hard, several times. I pulled him away. Then we ran back down the alley.

Back on avenue Parmentier someone said it was best to separate and meet up again at Matthias’s place in a quarter of an hour. It seemed a good idea though no one was sure why.

Suddenly Luke was on his own. His heart was pounding. The shutters of shops were covered with elaborate snakes of graffiti. Broken glass glittered in the gutter. A puddle held the reflection of the moon, pale as ice. Two people walked towards him and he immediately felt vulnerable and alone, bristling at the threat but ready to defend himself against anyone, indifferent to everything. They walked past nervously, aware, it seemed, of some volatile presence.

Luke was the last to arrive at Matthias’s. We were all panicked and scared but mainly we were excited, excited and dangerous, ready to go out and fight again. Matthias noticed his hand was hurting, Luke’s face throbbed where he had been hit. Matthias poured drinks which we inhaled quickly. We talked about the fight over and over, listened attentively to each other’s account of what had happened, how we had felt, what we had done. We wondered what kind of damage we had done to him and reassured each other that, at the very worst, he had maybe lost a few teeth and broken his nose: injuries like this had suddenly become no more significant than grazes. We had not even knocked him out but, had I not pulled Luke off, I don’t know if he would have stopped kicking him.

Years later Nicole told me that one of the things that had surprised her about Luke was how tender he was. But that night, in passage Beslay, I glimpsed a capacity for cruelty, for inflicting pain, that he would later turn on himself.

Matthias said we should go back and give him another helping. Everyone laughed but, beneath our exhilaration, there was some small element of shame which made itself felt more and more powerfully as the violence drained from us and left us weak. We parted, each of us a little scared of what had happened and what might happen, frightened that we had been initiated into a spiral of violence and reprisal, a vendetta from which we might be unable to extricate ourselves.

It was not a big thing morally and, looking back now, of all the things that happened to Luke and the rest of us, it would be among the very last that I would trade back if I had to start pawning the events in my life. A whole dimension of human existence opened up and became plain in those few moments. It changed us in some way; violence lost its mystery. There was a huge gulf separating the world of fighters and non-fighters and we had crossed it. We were different now. We could see the attraction of being violent men in a gang, could see the pleasure of violence and the self-respect and satisfaction it gave you – but at the same time this was tempered by a sense of how foolish and pathetic this was. It was for this reason as much as any fear of getting caught that we all agreed to tell no one else – not Nicole, not Sahra, no one – about what had happened.

I asked Luke about this incident when I saw him in London, many years later.

‘You remember when we beat that guy up that night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you ever tell Nicole about it?’

‘No.’

‘How come?’

‘How come what?’

‘How come you didn’t tell her?’

‘Well, we agreed didn’t we?’

‘But you know how it is. You make all sorts of promises not to tell your woman this or that – and nine times out of ten you tell her.’

‘Well. I didn’t tell her.’ He was sitting very still. Then, for the first time since we had been sitting there, I saw the life return to his eyes.

‘It was great wasn’t it?’ he said, smiling.

In the days following the fight Alex was often on the brink of telling Sahra about what had happened but always, at the last moment, he restrained himself. It was difficult to keep things from her. Partly because she was so open herself, but mainly because, for the first time in his life, Alex found that he had formed a close friendship with the woman he was going out with. In the past the women he had been involved with had never been his friends: almost, sometimes, never quite. He had liked his girlfriends, loved them, but eventually their romantic involvement had always curtailed or overridden the relationship’s potential for friendship. This simple, apparently common experience of being friends with his girlfriend was entirely new to him, so new that, for a time, he was not even aware of it, or at least was aware of it only in terms of unexpected compatibilities, a system of reckoning which actually plays no part in friendship.

She was the only woman he had ever met who, exactly like him, preferred to leave restaurants as soon as she had finished eating. They asked for the bill while they were still chewing and, ideally, left while still swallowing. In terms of the cinema they shared the same middle of the road – more accurately middle of the auditorium – taste. Going to the cinema with Luke was always something of a strain – a neck strain – for Alex because Luke insisted on sitting at the front with the screen looming over them. Alex liked to sit slap bang in the middle of the middle; Sahra was neurotically obsessed with doing so. Invariably these perfect seats were already occupied and they often had to sample four or five pairs of seats before selecting the ones – usually those they had originally opted for – that offered an acceptably compromised combination of centrality, unobstructed visibility and leg room. They also discovered that they were great cinema-leavers. Ten minutes, half an hour or an hour into a film, Sahra would gesture with her thumb towards the exit and they would be up and out. On one occasion they were within minutes of the end of a film when Alex turned towards her, moved one arm over the other and, without any hesitation, they gathered their things together and stumbled out of the darkness. There was never any disagreement: they always wanted to leave at the same time.

It wasn’t simply a question of compatibility. Even their divergences and disagreements were a source of harmony. On the subject of Luke, for example. Sahra thought he was funny, clever, good company . . . What she found hard to take was Alex’s ‘need to idolise him, to make him into something more than he is’.

They were lying in bed, tipsy, after a dinner at Nicole’s.

‘I don’t
idolize
him.’

‘You do. It’s not enough for you to be friends with him. You have to look up to him. And to do that you have to make him into something he’s not. Which means, weirdly, that you’re not doing justice to him.’

‘I don’t idolise him but I do see him as—’

‘What about what you
don’t
see him as?’

‘What don’t I see him as?’

‘Look, I love them to death too, both of them. Luke is terrific. But I can also see that he’s a complete waster. You don’t notice it because he’s so thin but in many ways he’s just greedy. A consumer. He doesn’t really have emotions. Just appetites. At the moment he’s happy as a sandboy because there’s so much still to gobble down. But what’s he going to be like when he’s tried it all, when there’s nothing left to gobble, or when he gets fed up gobbling?’

‘I don’t know. You tell me.’

‘He’ll be exactly like my brother.’

‘And what’s your brother like?’

‘Dead.’

‘No!’

‘No, that was a lie. He’s a fat, idle pig,’ said Sahra. ‘Honestly, he’s like a greedy only child—’

‘Your brother’s an only child? Now we’re really getting to the crux of the matter.’

Sahra laughed. ‘I mean Luke. But they’re both oblivious to everything outside their own desires. It’s like he hasn’t been weaned. The world is just a breast to be sucked.’

‘How can you say that when he’s just cooked yet another incredible meal for us?’

‘Easily. The fact that he’s very generous doesn’t stop him being totally selfish.’ Alex kissed her. Whatever he thought of his friend it was always pleasing to hear him denounced like this. He was less keen on what came next.

‘Or maybe what’s going on is that you project your own desires on to him, that you like imagining you’re him.’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘Maybe it’s not Luke at all,’ said Sahra, slowly. ‘Maybe it’s Nicole. You worship Luke because you want to fuck Nicole.’

‘Very clever,’ said Alex, quickly. ‘I think it all comes down to you and this only-child brother of yours. How old were you, by the way, when you first sucked his pig-dick?’ Sahra punched him on the shoulder. ‘And while we’re on the subject of selfishness,’ Alex went on, ‘you are the most selfish sleeper I’ve ever shared a bed with.’

It was true. During her waking hours Sahra was considerate, thoughtful; asleep she sprawled, hogging the duvet and mattress as if he were not there. At first, forced into the chilly fringes of the bed, he lay awake, fascinated by the sea-change that came over her. Then it became a source of irritation. He started shoving her back into her half of the bed, tugging the duvet over his way, dragging her – as he hoped he would – out of the depths of her sleep.